My father spent most of his time in World War II on board the USS Missouri, the battleship built in record time to avenge Pearl Harbor. He and his fellow sailors felt they were likely to die as the ship headed for Tokyo in 1945 to attack in a bloody battle to end the war. Military leaders expected more than a million Americans would be killed in that effort
But two atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused the Japanese emperor to overrule his military commander and surrender.
Instead, my dad and others stood on the deck in their dress whites as Gen. Douglas McArthur accepted the unconditional surrender of Japan to end the war.
Like many soldiers and sailors, my dad was prepared to die for his country. It was his duty, but he also was a motorcycle daredevil who rod in thrill shows with his girlfriend and, later, wife, my mother who road alongside him or sometimes perched on the handlebars with no helmet or protective gear.
“Life should be lived to the fullest,” he told my mother. “Anything else is a waste of time.” His death at age 29 came not from living on the edge but in an industria accident that electrocuted him at work.
My mother felt the same way. She loved riding motorcycles, even tried wing walking on a bi-plane in 1947 when she was pregnant carrying me.
Her father, my grandfather, told me that “if you are not living on the age, you are taking up too much room.”
Over the years, I’ve pushed the edges of the proverbial envelope — crawling throgh a dark forest in Prince Edward County, VA, to take clandestine photos of the Ku Klux Klan meeting after the county’s racist school board and supervisors shut down the public schools and opened an all-white school to avoid a federal court order to integrate was one. Another was talking a gang leader in St. Louis to give me information on the illicit drug trade.
At one point, my wife said she figured I had “used up about 37 or 38 of my nine lives in a career of living on the edge. Sometimes, the risks caught up to me: A helicopter crash in 1972 put me in the hospital, followed by a long record of rehab. So did a motorcycle crash with a black steer on U.S. 221 near the bottom of Bent Mountain in Roanoke County that, doctors said, should have killed me or, at least, left me crippled.
“Patient is a walking miracle,” `wrote one of the surgeron when I left the hospital after two-and-half months of treatment, recovery and rehab. I walked out without a lilmp.
That, the hold cliche says, was then and this is now. Now I’m hobbled by a stupid accident a few months ago where my foot slipped off the pedal of an parking brake and the lower part of my leg struck a cross bar on my wife’s CanAm, leaving out a nasty-looking wound that put me in the ER at Carilion New River Valley Medical Center. Four hours later, they released me, starting a period of two more trips to the ER, several more visits to the local Clinic in Floyd an a period of what appeared to be healing.
Then, after two weeks of of working on a project that had me away from Floyd and the area, and changing dressings myself, a trip to the Floyd clinic sent me to the ER at NRV again where a vascular scan found an abscess and an operation that evening and a prolonged statement to the hospital, a second operation and attachment of a medical “vacuum” that was supposed to clean out the abscess and flush it with heavy duty antibiotics at a prolonged stay at Radford Health and Rehab.
Today, in my third week of rehab, which includes a post-midnight return to the ER last week to repair a leaking dressing and attachment point of the vacuum and a “post-op” followup with one of the orthopedic surgeons, I remain mostly flat on my back with few answers to a supposed wound that cannot heal.
Amy, who is home staying in to try and avoid the bugs that are gooing around Floyd County, including the flu, Covid, Tonsillitis and lord knows what else.
At the moment, the jury is still out on when I will be released to return home, where many needed projects are piling up.
It’s hard to avoid living on the edge when the edge has you surrounded
